Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Impeach Obama

Upon taking office, President Obama
recklessly escalated the war in Afghanistan, while refusing to be either open
or consistent with the public as to the necessity for this war, or to his war
aims, which changed from speech to speech, tracking polling data more than any
moral or security barometer, all the while costing more lives.

Simultaneously, following the lead of
his criminal predecessor, the President fecklessly expanded that war into
Pakistan without allowing for any public debate on the matter.

Similarly unaccountable and
irresponsible was the President’s decision to wage war in Yemen, Somalia, and across
North Africa, a war which accompanies the expansion of a U.S. military presence
on that continent, an expansion which, historical evidence suggests, will lead
to the U.S. becoming an even more prominent target for military activity at
home and abroad, thereby imperilling rather than protecting the public.

This President has given a full-throated
endorsement of many of the terroristic methods associated with the wars waged
by his predecessor, maintaining the torture prison at Guantanamo, permitting a
set of revolving torture prisons in Afghanistan and Somalia to replace the more
permanent institutions, and embracing murder as a viable legal alternative to
detention.

The President has launched a spirited
defence of jingoistic and counter-productive imperialistic American
exceptionalism, sentiments which amount to warmongering.

The President signed the National
Defence Authorisation Act, which permitted the indefinite detention without
trial of American citizens.

The President has demonstrated his willingness
to use drones to murder people on the basis of how well their activity matches
a profile, and presides over a weekly “kill list”, an ugly and unethical abuse
of power given the lack of interest in capturing criminals, the civilian deaths
which result from acting on such a list, and his willingness to murder American
citizens.

The President argued that a war waged
using drones—as in Libya, where the United States deployed enormous force to
overthrow a government—is not a war at all, thereby setting a frightening
precedent to allow the executive branch to dodge responsibility and wage war
unchecked. Given that many wars of the
future will be waged in this manner, the President’s redefinition of war has made
a significant contribution to enabling the abuse of power and ensuring that war
will become an increasingly casual enterprise in which deaths on the “other”
side carry little or no moral weight.

The President who promised to preside
over the most “open and transparent” administration in history went to
extraordinary lengths to hide his “murder memo” from the public, when in fact
the release of such a memo was very clearly in the public interest.

The President (again, remember the “open
and transparent” bit) has launched an extraordinarily vicious campaign to shut
down whistleblowers, thereby closing down what has become the public’s primary
window into the workings of the secretive national security apparatus.

The President’s Justice Department, as
we have learned in the last few days in what has been for me the final straw,
has also seized records from the Associated Press in what seems a violation of First
Amendment freedoms. This is particularly
egregious given that the administration’s claim that leaks to the AP “put the
American people at risk” is hogwash, notably because of AP’s deference in
holding off with publication of the story in question pending administration
approval.

This latest abuse demonstrates the
administration’s selective approach to justice.
The President has shamefully refused to prosecute major criminals for
their involvement in obscene financial deals which helped to plunge our nation’s
economy into a tailspin, and yet casually violates press freedoms in an effort
to intimidate journalists and limit the public’s access to information.

There are undoubtedly plenty of
Republicans who would like to see the President impeached, if for all the wrong
reasons. They will focus on Benghazi,
where it is increasingly clear that their already razor-thin case is
evaporating as new evidence suggests that someone,
somewhere, doctored the White House e-mails to make them look incriminatory. They will focus on the IRS investigations (on
which the President had precisely zero impact and input, unlike Nixon’s
personal targeting of his opponents in Watergate), which entirely correctly investigated
a series of newly-formed, anti-tax organisations which might well be suspected
of trying to get the most advantageous tax status they could, and which like
any new wave of political-non-profits, should be investigated.

I am equally certain that Democrats will
close ranks around the President, fearful that standing up for any principles
will affect their showing in 2014 and beyond.
All of this means that any proceedings will stall, and that this
President, like his criminal predecessor, will not be subject to justice.

But if Bill Clinton could be impeached
for misleading Congress about an affair, surely President Obama could be
impeached for commissioning murder, seeking to aggrandise executive power in
order to wage wars of aggression, stifling inquiry into the workings of his war
of terror, and acting in a way that imperils public safety, violates the public
trust, and is in clear contravention of the public interest.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I work as an assistant professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research. This blog also appears on the website of the Redding Record Searchlight.